Rachel Davis would rather risk death than remain a prisoner of the ruthless man intent on gaining her inheritance. Trapped on a private train with the villain, she makes a desperate bid for escape and runs into the arms of an unlikely savior. Aristocratic, arrogant, and deeply cynical about love, Lucas Grainger is her last choice for a husband—even a husband of convenience. But desperate times call for desperate measures: taking Lucas to bed and submitting to his tender, hungry desires may be her only hope…

Lucas Grainger has sworn never to take a wife, but he’s not about to let anyone else marry Rachel. He has his own reasons for marrying the gentle, quick-witted widow, reasons she need not know. But holding Rachel night after night awakens deeper hungers than he has ever known, and a calculated marriage soon yields to a blissful, blinding—and dangerous—passion. For if Rachel knew who Lucas really was—of the dark secrets that haunt him—she’d never choose him as her protector…

Theirs is a union both erotic and enduring, and any man who tries to part Lucas from the woman he loves will have the devil to pay…

The Northern Devil’s Bookshelf

By the time I started this book, I had a fairly good set of references for the early 1870’s in western North America. But I knew the challenge would be writing about the trains.

Railroad tracks had only been laid from the Atlantic to the Pacific a few years earlier and passenger traffic was hardly standardized. Pullman had only been in business for a few years and private railroad cars were only for the richest of the rich. Railroad cars were made of wood; fragile and flammable, few of them have survived. From a woman’s perspective, I was interested in the passenger’s experience, in the sheer romance of making one’s way across a hostile landscape, while conveyed in a tiny, highly decorated cocoon where you could be risking disease or even starvation.